For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.

-Charles Baudelaire. “Constantin Guys: The Painter of Modern Life.”

The superficial pretext – the exotic and the picturesque – appeals only to the outsider. To depict a city as a native would calls for other, deeper motives – the motives of the person who journeys into the past, rather than to foreign parts.

-Walter Benjamin. “The Return of the Flâneur.”

In this course we encounter and confront modernity by way of walking the city in literature.

We will begin with two important texts (Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and Charles Baudelaire’s “Constantin Guys: The Painter of Modern Life”) that conjure the figure of the flâneur (as someone who strolls the city without purpose), whose shadow is cast throughout all reading materials in this course.

We will walk the streets of Paris, London, Venice, Istanbul, New Orleans, Montreal, and Hong Kong through various literary texts, following the steps of such writers as Poe, Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, Kate Chopin, Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino, Xi Xi, Orhan Pamuk, and Rawi Hage.

 

---

The city and literature, writing the city, metropolis, urban walking, the flâneur, modernity, urban space, women in the city, the underground, shelter, and contact zone

 

---

Students will develop skills in two main aspects in relation to literary studies:

1. A primary objective is to provide students with the critical apparatus for reading and rereading the city and modernity;
2. A parallel objective is to encourage students to develop their own creative responses to urban experiences outside the classroom. Students will select and modify the literary devices and styles they come across throughout the course and develop their own literary voices.

 

---

The course consists of three contact hours per week (Friday, 2:30 pm – 5:20 pm). Each seminar will consist of lecture, discussion, improvisation session, short presentation (casual sharing) from students, and/or writing workshop.

 

---

There will be four assessment components for the course, as follows:

1. Participation and attendance (10%)
2. Individual improvisation* (15%)
3. Creative writing project (35%)
4. Final critical paper (40%)

Written assignments must be submitted via Turnitin. Detailed guidelines and marking rubrics will be made available on Moodle.

*Please refer to the respective assessment component guidelines for more information (to be uploaded on Moodle). Here is a brief introduction to individual improvisation: throughout the course, each student will be assigned one improvisation session (approximately 6 of these sessions across the semester). As an improvisation, it is part of the design of this assessment component that students could hardly develop the content or outline of it well in advance. To prepare for this assignment, students are expected to actively and closely read the reading materials for the week of their assigned improvisation session. In each improvisation session, each assigned student will be given a unique topic related to the reading materials of that week. A topic can be a question, a scenario, or an idea etc. Each assigned student will then improvise their response/solution to, and/or interpretation/performance of, the given topic. Students may also choose to explain/justify their improvisation at the end. This will ideally lead to class discussion surrounding the topics and reading materials. Students’ performances will be assessed based on how well they understand the reading materials of the week, creativity, as well as the insight they provide in their improvisation.

 

---

Students are expected to purchase a copy of (a) Rawi Hage’s novel Cockroach (ISBN: 9780887848346) and of (b) Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (trans. Michael Henry Helm, ISBN: 9780060576172)

Alternatively, you can choose to obtain digital copies of these two works via the following links:

Cockroach, https://houseofanansi.com/products/cockroach

Death in Venice, https://www.harpercollins.com/products/death-in-venice-thomas-mann?variant=32116883324962

All other prescribed readings, including literary texts and secondary materials, for the course will be uploaded on Moodle.